I’ve decided to put my suspension letter online so people can see what sort of ridiculous reasons party members get suspended for.

• I was suspended for a total of 19 days – just long enough to ensure that I couldn’t stand to be a Labour candidate for my area. My branch objected and tried to have the vote delayed so I could be on the ballot, but it was overruled. It’s hard not to view my suspension as politically motivated.
• The suspension was lifted quite swiftly in my case. This doesn’t normally happen, but the intervention of a solicitor, the weakness of the case against me and the passing of the threat of my potential candidacy must have resulted in the speed with which I was reinstated to the party.
• I am no longer a member: I left of my own accord after the suspension was lifted.
• My suspension letter from the Labour Party is 26 pages long. I was suspended for allegedly ‘bullying’ a regional party organiser because in my role as CLP Secretary I chased him up on some urgent matters. Our CLP was banned from using the communications tool ‘Organise’, meaning that myself and my co-Secretary had to rely completely on the regional organiser to sendy ANY emails to our members. I was suspended several months later (after I had stepped down as Secretary) on the basis of a string of emails in which I tried to explain why we needed to give our local members more notice for meetings and similar matters.
• My suspension letter implied that making requests more than once and copying relevant party officers into my emails were the grounds for my suspension, as this constituted bullying.
• The suspension was the result of a complaint, and as these were private emails it means that the regional organiser involved or one of the South East regional staff are most likely to have made the conveniently-timed complaint.
• The letter also implies that I breached rule 2.1.8 (the discrimination and prejudice rule), yet nothing in the evidence supplied relates to that rule – even tangentially. Requests for an explanation (from myself and my solicitor) as to why that rule was cited in the letter were never answered by the Disputes team or any Labour party department, despite asking numerous times.
• The role of CLP Secretary (like other officer roles) is unpaid and voluntary. Secretaries are voted into their roles by the local members. It demands a lot of work. And yet taking on the role and trying to do it properly can result in false accusations and slurs on your character – if you happen to not be the preferred choice of the bureaucrats overseeing things in your area.

Here is the suspension letter in full (with some names redacted for privacy reasons). Some annotations have been added (in green) to give context and clarity.